gazafunds.com - Donate directly to a Palestinian family in urgent need of evacuation, medical attention, food, rebuilding homes/businesses etc. (Spotlights 1 verified gfm at a time so if you don’t know who/where to donate to just go here and donate to the one they show you!)
Help provide tents (urgent):
The Sameer Project: Currently providing tents for displaced families in Gaza (emergency bc tents in Rafah are being burned as we speak) (paypal) (gfm)
Food, cash & essentials:
Care for Gaza: Working on the ground in Gaza to distribute food, cash, medicine & other essentials to displaced families. (paypal) (gfm)
Direct Aid for Gaza: also working on the ground in Gaza to distribute food, cash & other daily essential suppliess to displaced families. (paypal) (gfm)
Water:
Gaza Municipality’s water project: The officialMunicipality of Gaza needs help rebuilding the water infrastructure in Gaza City to restore access to clean water and waste management services for the people of Gaza. (This campaign only has a couple of weeks left but it’s still only at 15%!)
crips for esims for gaza: If you don’t know how to buy esims or don’t have the capacity to manage them (e.g. topping up regularly), this team of volunteers are collecting funds to buy & manage gaza esims regularly
Medical Aid
Palestine Red Crescent Society: Provides emergency medical and ambulance services and humanitarian relief on the ground in Gaza e.g. rescuing and treating the wounded.
In a language that contains words like devotion, passion, enthusiasm, love, fascination, obsession, etc., I can’t help but regret this tendency to cram all those meanings into “hyperfixation,” a word which manages to pathologize and medicalize the act of having interests.
“The average pediatric wheelchair can cost thousands of dollars. And when children grow and their needs evolve — or a wheelchair gets damaged — those costs multiply.
So, the team at MakeGood NOLA, a New Orleans-based adaptive design lab, has made something that can transform the world for disabled children.
“Introducing the world’s first fully 3D-printed wheelchair,” MakeGood founder and president Noam Platt started a recent social media video.
He wheels a small, almost toy-like lime-green wheelchair into the frame, complete with a matching harness, suitable for children ages 2 to 8.
“Everything from the body, to the wheels, to the tires, the seat, and even the straps, all were 3D printed on a regular Bambu Labs A1 machine,” Platt continued.
This means the design is fully compatible with a regular 3D printer anyone can have in their home.
“We designed this to be modular and easy to make,” Platt continued. “Really, anyone with a 3D printer and some filament can download the files and print it.” [Note: You can also use 3D printers for free or a small cost at some public libraries and maker spaces, opening up accessibility even further.]
Once the prototype is completely finished, it will be available as a fair-use download that anyone can use for free.
ALT
Pictured: The new 3D-printed chair by MakeGood. Photo courtesy of MakeGood NOLA
Platt said that because it has a modular design, the wheelchair can be put together without any tools or glue. And if any part of it breaks or is damaged, users can simply re-print the single piece they need.
“Mine costs more than my car, I can’t imagine having to buy a new one every year or two as they outgrow it,” @thisisharlie continued. “You’re going to change the world.”
For Platt, that’s always been the plan.
When he created MakeGood in 2021, the nonprofit design lab was thinking of the more than 1 billion people around the globe who live with disabilities.
“Since traditional design often overlooks diverse bodies and minds, it is crucial to reshape the built environment,” MakeGood shares on its website. “The challenges our communities face — both physical and social — are solvable.”
MakeGood works with individuals to co-create their adaptive design solutions, centering the “Need Knower,” the disabled person or their primary caregivers, throughout the entire process.
Since the founding of MakeGood, 1,600 individualized adaptive devices have been delivered to families for free. Platt’s team found a niche with this wheelchair, which they call the Toddler Mobility Trainer, or TMT.
On its website, the organization says the wheelchairs were “designed with therapists from all over the world” and offer “unmatched mobility and independence to young kids.”
Children and parents agree.
“It’s an A+,” one parent said of an earlier prototype of the TMT in a report by CBS News. “It’s helped [my son] become more mobile and be able to adapt into the other things that he’s going to be offered. It’s helped his development.”
At the start of the design process, Platt reached out to area hospitals to see if he could fill a need.
“Part of it is empowering clinicians that we can go beyond what is commercially available,” Platt told CBS News. “We can really create almost anything.”
Now in the final stages of tweaking the TMT design to be ready for release, Platt is eager to get the wheelchair rolled out and into the homes of the children who need them most.
ALT
Pictured: A rendering of the 3D printed design, which will soon be available for download. Photo courtesy of MakeGood NOLA
“We think this sort of 3D printing and design is going to be huge for accessibility, and for wheelchairs specifically,” Platt said in his social media video.
“We have a growing list of people who’ve requested these, and once we finish the design, we’ll start filling those requests with custom-printed chairs, including things that you might need for your particular chair,” Platt said in a follow-up video.
Because the chairs are easily 3D printed, they can come in any color and can be modified to include other accommodations, like a section to hold a breathing device or other aid. With years of customization and design experience under his belt, this new innovation is simply an extension of Platt’s dedication to inclusive design.
In 2023, Platt told New Mobility: “I feel like every time I deliver one of these [assistive] devices, I get a hopeful feeling that the world has been changed a little bit for the better for the next generation.””
When I first learned from my friends in Gaza that they are still expected to pay rent for the ground where they can put their tent down, and that if they can not afford this they can be turned away, something in me broke. It was something that needed to break.
In the global north, many people I speak to imagine apocalyptic scenarios as a release from things like work and paying rent. But this is just not true. Even in the midst of unthinkable conditions where the skies are red with bombings, the entire population is starving, and people of all ages from little babies to the elders being massacred every single day for years… capitalism continues to exact daily violence on every single level.
People will price gouge food and medical supplies in marketplaces, setting prices higher and higher as the starvation becomes more severe. The people who still own land will charge rent on that land, even for families in tattered tents. Really process this.
And this is not just a natural condition that these capitalist systems are simply responding to and exploiting. These systems created the conditions in the first place.
“The violence all around us is so atmospheric, so hysterical, so devastating and bloody, it seems that I have escaped into the supernatural… But this is not supernatural. This is not the vengeance of Gods. Though it may seem like the sky is raining bombs and the sun, moon and stars are crying tears of rage, this is man-made. This is settler colonialism. This is Zionism. This is genocide. This is our ongoing Nakba. The settlers have stolen land with their violence and have made a claim on the skies with their bombs.”
- Rana Barakat on 11 December 2023 from the essay titled “Is the sky crying?” featured in the book From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine.
Israel’s entire economic system hinges on genocide. They profit from stealing the land. They profit from testing weapons and military/policing tactics on the Palestinian people, and then selling these technologies and training militaries and police forces around the world. This apocalyptic terror is business for them.
The rest of the global north, too, profit from this arrangement. They can sell weapons and supplies to Israel. There are people in my country who hold gatherings where white people buy land in Palestine that was illegally obtained from brutality, slaughter, and forced displacement. The deaths of Palestinian people represent global north profits.
Look at the conditions that nations like Canada wish to put on their recognition of Palestinian statehood: demilitarization and control over Palestinian elections and governance. They offer what amounts to a geopolitical hostage situation. They want Palestine to be docile and controlled. This is imperialism.
There is no relief from global capitalism until it is overthrown. There is no relief from the constant violence of global capitalism unless we hold solidarity with the people of Palestine.
My dear friend Fadel has been living in unthinkable conditions. The smoke from bombings and toxic gasses from gas shells inflamed his lungs and he survived only from accessing intensive care at a hospital.
But people cannot stay in hospitals until they are completely healed, because there are so many people who are ill, injured, or dying, and there are so few medical supplies. Fadel is still waiting to have the funds to surgically remove the shrapnel from his body after surviving the bombing of his family’s home. Now he also needs urgent treatment and medication for severe inflammation in his lungs.
His family is sheltering for the time being through an act of good will. After being released from the hospital, someone treated them with compassion and allowed them to stay and rest. He does not know how long this act of compassion will last before his family is charged rent.
Please continue to support him in his efforts to survive. The entire structure of global capitalism is set up against him, but human compassion still exists. We can act contrary to our material interests and send money to families like his. We can help each other survive this apocalyptic brutality.
perfect moment perfect characters perfect romance perfect husband perfect ally behavior 100000/10 no notes bram understood the assignment in ways the culture still has not caught up to. truly incredible how much this display of profound care and insistent devotion in the face of horror and shame resonates now with absolutely no translation necessary. GOD.
It just hit me that the soil turned gray from concrete dust. So many buildings have been turned to rubble that their powdered remains completely blanket the soil and muddy the sea itself to the point that it looks like a gray scale filter has been applied.
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
